Frenny Bawa: Education: A value that leads to success

Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun09.27.2012

Frenny Bawa is an Ismaili who came to Canada as a child from Uganda and made Vancouver her home. She has worked for the Royal Bank and later headed Research in Motion in India.Ward Perrin
/ Vancouver Sun

Frenny Bawa is an Ismaili who came to Canada as a child from Uganda and made Vancouver her home. She has worked for the Royal Bank and later headed Research in Motion in India.Ward Perrin
/ Vancouver Sun

Nearly 60 years ago and only a few years before Aga Khan III’s death in 1957, Ismailis were told that if can only afford to send one child to school, they ought to send their daughters because educating girls has a greater effect on the community’s health and welfare.

Aga Khan III, father of the current Aga Khan, was years ahead in his thinking.

It wasn’t until the United Nations set its millennium development goals that elimination of gender disparity at all levels of education was promised by 2015. Now, the World Bank estimates that an extra year of secondary schooling can increase girls’ future wages by 10 to 20 per cent, while research by the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations indicates that women and girls reinvest 90 per cent of their earnings in their families while men and boys reinvest only 30 to 40 per cent.

Because the Aga Khan traces his lineage through the prophet Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima, women and girls have always held a special place in Ismaili society. But it was with the directive in the early 1950s that educating girls gained momentum within the community.

The Aga Khan’s suggestion is what motivated Frenny Bawa’s mother. Although she only had a Grade 3 education, Bawa’s mother insisted to her husband that their five girls be educated. She insisted that they would not go to school in the dusty, Ugandan village where the family had settled two generations earlier. And that meant moving to Kampala where the schools were better and the instruction was in English.

Frenny, the oldest, was in Grade 2 the year they moved to the Ugandan capital. She already spoke four languages; none of them English.

Frenny was 12 when Ugandan dictator Idi Amin issued his surprising order expelling Asians from the East African nation. Canada agreed to take some of the refugees and the Bawas were on the first Canadian-bound flight out of Kampala and were among the few families that came to Vancouver — an experience that reinforced for the family the value of education and, particularly, the value of being able to speak English.

After high school, Frenny went to Simon Fraser University with the intention of doing a degree in English literature. But during the summer between first and second year, she worked at a bank. Heeding the advice of her manager — a woman – Bawa switched to business administration, graduated and went to McGill University in Montreal to do her master’s degree in business administration.

Business is her calling and a field in which she has earned an international reputation all the while staying true to her Canadian roots and firmly attached to her Vancouver home.

In 2011, Bawa was named one of the 10 most powerful women in India by Forbes magazine.

But that’s jumping ahead of the story.

After collecting her master’s degree, Bawa came back to Vancouver to work for the Royal Bank. Along the way, she added French to the list of languages she speaks.

She was posted to a Surrey branch. A customer came in and began speaking to her in what she assumed was Punjabi – a language she doesn’t speak.

“I gave him a blank look and he went away disgusted,” says Bawa.

A few days later, Tara Singh Hayer (the publisher of The Indo-Canadian Times, who was murdered in 1998) came to see her.

In private, he told her that when they learned that Bawa had been posted to the branch, many Sikhs — especially those who had recently immigrated — had been excited at the thought that they would be able to do business in their own language. Bawa admits her name confuses many people. Her first name is a common Farsi name, while Bawa is a common Sikh name.

Of course, she is neither. “I was really embarrassed.”

Bawa didn’t think it would be possible for her to learn Punjabi quickly enough to be able to do business in that language.

“So, I asked him if I brushed up on my Hindi (India’s official language), would that work.”

It would, he said. And it did.

“Within a year or so, my portfolio had exploded. Anybody in Surrey who needed a loan came to me. People who had just immigrated were brought to me to set up bank accounts. It was interesting.”

But Bawa was soon ready for other challenges and jumped at the chance to join Research In Motion, an upstart Ontario company whose BlackBerry was just starting to make huge gains against other cellphone manufacturers.

She was RIM’s global marketing director and, later, country director for India.

Once again, she was a minority in a country where sectarian divisions have often led to violent confrontations. The confusion over identity that had caused initial problems in Surrey, made it easier for her in India.

“Indians embraced me as an Indian. ... They were proud that an Indian woman had been picked to run BlackBerry’s operations,” says Bawa who oversaw the growth of BlackBerry’s market share to more than one million customers.

“India accepted me, but I was always yearning for Canada and Vancouver.”

Bawa’s affinity for India is evident. She describes herself as an Ismaili-Canadian of Indian origin; she make no reference to Uganda. She has never felt linked to either Africa or Uganda. As RIM’s global marketing director, Bawa has been back to Africa. But she’s never yet returned to Uganda.

It’s not that she hasn’t had opportunities. A few years ago, the Ugandan ambassador to India — an Indian woman — invited Bawa to a presidential inauguration. But work got in the way.

When RIM’s team did some deals in Uganda, Bawa could have gone, but she was more urgently needed somewhere else in the world.

Having been forced to flee, Uganda is a place Bawa may go back to at some point. But it’s not at the top of her travel list.

Bawa resigned from RIM last fall, in the same month that she was named to the Forbes list.

She was exhausted, having spent anywhere from half to three-quarters of the previous seven years travelling between India, her Vancouver home and RIM’s Ontario headquarters.

Bawa isn’t certain what she’ll do next. Among the things she’s thinking about is why British Columbia has failed to establish a RIM-, Google- or Apple-sized company, what it might take to build one and whether she’s the person to do it.

Meanwhile, Bawa serves on four advisory boards. Three are at Simon Fraser University where she did her undergraduate degree. The other is on the B.C. Jobs and Investment Board.

Service along with education are values she learned from her family and from her faith.

“The values that I was brought up with are deep and profound. I try to live my life with integrity and honesty,” she says.

It hasn’t always been easy in business, but Bawa says, “I have found lots of strategies in the corporate world to be successful so that I didn’t claw my way to the top. I find that behaviour abhorrent.”

Now that she has the time, Bawa says giving back to the community is important to her.

“One of the interesting characteristics of being Ismaili is that you don’t have a homeland. So, when you’re invited into somebody else’s homeland, there’s a very strong recognition that to be a good citizen, you have to give back ... you have to invest and nurture that homeland.”

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